


When Everything's Going Down

by voodoochild



Category: Mad Men
Genre: Comment Fic, Episode Tag, F/M, PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-15
Updated: 2010-09-15
Packaged: 2017-10-11 20:40:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 493
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/116873
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/voodoochild/pseuds/voodoochild
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's still 1945 in Roger's head, sometimes, and there's not too many people who he trusts. Joan's one of them, though.</p>
            </blockquote>





	When Everything's Going Down

**Author's Note:**

> Written for **thatyourefuse** in the iTunes playlist challenge. Title and quote from Black Rebel Motorcycle Club's "Shuffle Your Feet". Takes place immediately post-"The Chrysanthemum and the Sword".
> 
> Warning: Roger Sterling is a racist asshat at times, and very anti-Japanese. I hope this isn't news to anyone.

_One for the peaceful protest that keeps the war in demand  
And who knows when I'll see you again?_

*****

The words are spinning around in his head (no, it's not the room, he's not that drunk), seeing Campbell's face and those yellow bastards' faces and Joan's face.

Since when is forgiveness a better quality than loyalty?

Fuck Campbell sideways. He hadn't served, hadn't even been born for WWII. He'd barely been in grammar school during Korea. War is a page in a history book to him; stories about men fighting and dying in places that are dots on a map and names on paper.

Roger still smells Okinawa in his dreams. Can remember the kamikaze the gunners took down only 35 meters from the _Daly's_ bow. Remembers the midshipman (Tompkins, from some podunk town in Indiana, played a Jew's harp all goddamn night) who had shoved him out of the torpedo room right before it was hit. Tries not to forget any of his squadron who died, even though it's been almost two decades.

(He _knows_ the Honda reps aren't the same Japs. He does. But for all he knows, somebody's brother or father or son could've been on one of those kamikaze planes or boats.)

Forgiveness is fucking overrated, but loyalty? That's something you can never have enough of. Don stayed - couldn't get him to leave, the stubborn fucker - through two companies and finally, his name on the door like Roger knew would happen one day.

And Joan stays. She always has. For almost ten years, she's watched him fly his highest and sink his lowest, and even when he's made a complete ass out of himself, she helps him fix it.

She can't fix this.

But when it's past eleven and he's already had Paulette field three calls from Jane, wondering if he's coming home, she walks through the office and into his. Shuts the door, toes her shoes off, and sits him down on the couch with a glass of water and some aspirin. And she stretches out on the floor, the way only he gets to see her, because she thinks people would call it "improper" for her to be lying on her stomach on his carpet, feet kicked up in the air.

Sometimes they don't talk during these nights; sometimes it's too hard or too fraught. All the things they don't say can't hurt them; words (and feelings) left unsaid.

Sometimes it's about mindless, everyday things; what she and Lane decided during the budget meeting, how his lunch with Parker from Anheuser-Busch went. Distraction that either or both of them need.

And sometimes it's confessions; startling, honest, I-can't-look-at-you-if-I-say-this talk. He tells her he wishes he'd never met Jane, never divorced Mona, proposed to her eight years ago. She tells him she doesn't love Greg, that he's a liar and will never be the star surgeon everyone thinks.

Loyalty. Honesty.

He has to believe this is the better way.


End file.
